Every now and then I come across people wondering why their network of sites is having problems.  They think they built it correctly and yet something went wrong.  Here are the key issues I would pay attention to if I were to build a network of sites.

Domains - Use different registrars, on different dates with different whois information and register the domains for varied time lengths.  This will randomize it but it also does create problems since false whois information can cause you to lose a domain.  The alternative is to use the private registration services.  But that will look weird if you have 100 sites all using private domain registration. 

Hosting - Forget about different IP addresses.  You need to use different vendors.  It is easy to compare the IP ownership and see that it is all hosted at one company.

Templates - Do not use the same look and feel.  It is easy to find sites by searching for identical footers or copyright notices.  You need to pay attention to the small stuff and make sure it is all different.

Toolbars - Most toolbars today are tracking your internet activity.  If you have a toolbar installed and you regularly visit your secret network of sites, your repetitive traffic could show these sites are related.

Links - If you interlink these sites it is especially easy to uncover that.  You need to randomize the links.  Also if the only inbound links are from your network, it is easy to determine that as well.  You should add some “noise” to the network and add easy links from outside sources like blog links, reciprocal links, etc.  Also outbound links are another easy item to investigate.  Make sure to add “noise” to the outbounds links as well.  And I think it goes without saying to randomize the anchor text a bit.

Congratulations to Darren Kay, Jim Hathaway and Liana Evans.  They are the happy winners of the GoodKarma WebmasterWorld Pubcon Pass Giveaway for the upcoming conference in Las Vegas. 

 Thank you to everybody you entered and better luck next time.  See you in Vegas!

Best of the Web (BOTW) is an often overlooked source of traffic.  BOTW only deals with legit sites, so if you are a spammer who is churning and burning, you can stop reading now.  For everyone else who is struggling to get their real sites traffic read on.

You probably have heard of them but never took the time to find what they are all about.  I guess that is partially because the BOTW crew are fun people who often buy people drinks WITHOUT forcing them to listen to a sales pitch. Not that you would remember any sales pitch after drinking all of the free booze they offer.

Sugarrae did an excellent interview with them and posted the BOTW interview on her blog.  It is a definite read and also make sure to check out Best Of The Web.  Their directory can help give a good boost to your site.  Their service does cost money but it also delivers results.

As I explained here, I am giving away three full conference passes to WebmasterWorld’s PubCon Conference in Las Vegas. 

To enter just answer any one of the three contest questions I asked during my last three  GoodKarma radio shows.  Each question you answer correctly will be a chance to win, so if you answer all three questions you will have three chances to win.  Answers can be submitted here.

Good Luck everybody and remember you only have 3 days left.  Feel free to post any questions in the comments field or give me a suggestion for future giveaways.

Entitlement - Many marketers, search engines and even myself are guilty of this.   We feel that we are entitled to certain things.  Internet Marketing does not guarantee anything and does not give anybody a free ride.  If you find a shortcut, that is great and you should enjoy it.  When that shortcut no longer works you should not complain and say that life is unfair.  Just adapt to the new landscape and move on.  You are not entitled to an easy ride.  Stop bitchin and being envious of others success.

Stepping on Others to Get Ahead - This is definitely not a new concept.  People in the brick and mortar world have been doing this for centuries.  It does not make it any less nasty.  People are purposely starting drama just to gain attention which they hope (and it usually does) lead to links and free publicity.  There are other ways to get publicity without hurting someone else.

Purposely Misleading - I understand you need to protect yourself.  I protect my sensitve information from my enemies.  When you purposley send out misleading information or inaccurate tools to the public it is bad karma.  In the forums people post misleading information and they lie about their research.  The search engines and others release tools that are not accurate and with every upgrade they become less accurate.  I’m not saying everyone is lying or that all tools are misleading.  It only takes a little bit of misleading to help confuse the marketplace.

I’m gonna save my other complaints for later.  What are your biggest annoyances?

We’ll be talking about link development and how to manage the process in the best way with Roger Montti, the founder and owner of www.Martinibuster.com and the Links Development moderator at WebmasterWorld.com.

Also during the show we’ll announce the clue for the third chance to win one of the three Pubcon conferences.  Don’t forget you can enter the contest 3 times (1 for each clue). 

If you have any questions that you would like us to cover during the show join us in the www.Webmasterradio.fm chatroom or send them to me.

Carolyn Tang, Director of Client Services for ShareASale.com will be joining me to discuss affiliate marketing and the big push for the holiday season.  We’ll cover tips for affiliate managers and publishers to make the most money at this very, very profitable time.

Also I’ll announce the second chance to qualify for the WMW Pubcon pass giveaway.

It is a good idea to schedule some private meetings when you travel to conferences.  In this online industry we gain many long distance relationships and conferences makes it easy for everybody to get together.

I like to make plans about a month before a conference with my friends who I know are attending and people that I would like to be more friendly with.  You would be surprised how much more information will be shared after you get to know someone a bit better.

If you have never met anyone in this industry face-to-face before, this is also a good way for newbies to pre-break the ice.  Drop an email, fill out a contact form or send a message via sticky mail and let someone know that you really enjoyed their writings and would like to buy them a drink at the conference.  No one turns down a free drink.  Well almost no one, Matt Cutts still prefers to pay the $2.50 for his sprite.

I was flying back to LaGuardia airport in New York City with my wife last week.  As we started to make our approach I started sharing trivia about the airport with her since she is not a native New Yorker.

For instance, the airport is the closet of the 3 NYC airports to Manhattan.  Also it was named after a NYC mayor and oh yea it is rated as one of the most dangerous airports in the US and yes it has the track record to prove it.  It has had multiple disasters.  The most recent was in 1994. Read the rest of this entry »

For ages the search engine rankings have been influenced by the links pointing to a site.  Way back when, it used to just be quantity of links but not for long.  People realized it was better to be linked on pages that search engines crawled more regularly and over time this evolved into the race for pagerank.

The pagerank race was easy to understand and track with the Google toolbar.  This helped too many people to be able to game the system and chaos started to prevail as relevancy no longer matter since the link game was too easy to manipulate.  This is when non-internet people started to “googlebomb” the rankings for fun and smart people made alot of money in a very short amount of time.    Read the rest of this entry »